Sunday, July 23, 2006

Joe-Mentum or No-Mentum?

Go Joe by Reps. Rosa DeLauro and John B. Larson, both Connecticut Democrats.

No More Joe by Irving Stolberg, former Democratic speaker of the Connecticut House of Representatives.

Stolberg gives his game away with this kind of rhetorical bombast:

And his defense of an incompetent president, a vice president who fits the dictionary definition of fascism and an extremist administration that has perpetrated torture, illegal eavesdropping and a general shredding of the Constitution is insulting to the people who elected him in the first place.

You can love or hate the Bush administration, but "the dictionary definition of fascism" is not a phrase intended for persuasion. On whom has this "extremist administration" illegally eavesdropped? Can Stolberg cited even one example? But this is not an argument, it's a sermon preached directly to the choir. Stolberg is parading his Bush-hating credentials before a presumed audience of anti-war Dems, courting the crowd's applause.

Remember when Joe Klein at least tried to pretend that he was an objective reporter/analyst? Check out the peroration of Klein's latest partisan stump speech in Time:

Joe Lieberman is, without question, one of the finest men I've known in public life. I could never imagine myself voting against him. But he was profoundly wrong about the most important issue of the past five years — and now, at the very least, he has to acknowledge that there's an elephant sitting in the pickup truck.